‘… How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’. (John 6:53)
John
6:51-58 (Year B: Trinity+11)
Johannine
shock therapy..
And so the reading of John chapter 6 continues over five
Sundays in the middle of ‘Mark’s year’.
A careful and prayerful reading of John 6 can open inexhaustible
treasures. Every sentence and every word carries depth and mystery. But it has
very practical implications for how we live today. Every now and again
Johannine shock is used with references to being born again (John
3:3) or the offer of living water to the Samaritan woman at the well (John
4:7-15) or eating the flesh of the Son of Man. This shocks and confounds the immediate
listeners. And we are to be shocked as well. Lest we lose ourselves in a quiet,
detached and care-free zone of contemplation we need to be shocked very now and
then.
In the 1986 film, Mission, set in South America in the 1750s
the Jesuit priest, Fr. Gabriel, leads the people forward as he carries the
monstrance with the blessed sacrament against a barrage of gun fire from a
joint Portuguese-Spanish army. The brutal and violent laceration of the people
and the monstrance is a powerful cinematic sign of Christ’s body ripped apart
in the poor and the oppressed (after Fr. Gabriel is cut down a little child
picks up the monstrance and leads the procession. Only a handful escape into
the jungle). Witness, community, persecution, violence, death, scattering,
remnant and new life. Flesh, Bread,
Life.
Shock
therapy applied today..
One way to apply some shock therapy in modern times is to
explore the Eucharistic theme of John 6 in the concrete social reality. Bishop Frank Weston, an Anglican bishop from
Zanzibar in the early decades of the 20th century declared in the
context of an Anglo-Catholic gathering in 1923:
The one thing England needs to learn is that Christ is in and amid
matter, God in flesh, God in sacrament.
He went on to say the following:
But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if
you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed
Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk
with Christ, mystically present in you through the streets of this country, and
find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot
claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums
… It is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the
Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the
souls and bodies of his children.
Such a challenging insight was not novel. Saint Ignatius of
Antioch writing in a letter to the Smyrnaeans, not long after the Gospel of
John was written down declared:
Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heterodox in regard to
the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none
for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the
hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because
they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness,
raised from the dead.
And writing two centuries later, Saint Basil the Great said:
The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment
hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you
do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep
locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not
perform are so many injustices that you commit.
(I am grateful for all of the above information to Rev
Patrick Comerford and his very useful regular blog here).
In short, we do not have the luxury of a worshiping a God
detached from the struggles and sufferings of the world around us. We move from
sacrament to world and back again because the world is the theatre in which
sacramental action happens through us and others. Dorothy
Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement wrote in 1935:
It is because we forget the
humanity of Christ – present with us today in the Blessed Sacrament just as
truly as when he walked with His apostles through the cornfields that Sunday
long ago – that we have ignored the material claims of our fellow man during
this capitalistic, industrialist era. We have allowed our brothers and sisters,
our fellow members in the Mystical Body to be degraded, to endure slavery to a
machine, to live in rat-infested holes. This ignoring of the material body of
our humanity which Christ ennobled when He took flesh, gives rise to the
aversion for religion evidenced by many…
Because
Christianity is a ‘materialist’ religion..
Christianity is a materialist religion in the sense that God
became material in human flesh and blood and thereby raised up all flesh to
God. Moreover, we reach God together and not individually and sacraments are
signs on the way pointing us upwards and forward as we touch, see and feel the
presence of God. This is the heart of the message of John 6. The detour into
chapter 6 of John’s Gospel in the middle of ‘Mark’s year’ has brought out, so
far, a number of central Eucharistic themes of the entire story of Jesus (with
two more Sundays to go in the company of John including this Sunday):
Back
to the reality of bread..
‘I am the living
bread’ declares Jesus. What does this mean to us today? Bread is a basic part of our diet and has
been down the centuries. With water, bread constitutes a normal element for
restoring and fuelling our bodies. In
other words, bread gives and sustains life.
But our lives are sustained by more than mere bread. We live on the
strength of love, affirmation, acceptance, challenge and positive relationship.
‘Not on bread alone’ does man live (Matthew
4:4). However, if we enlarge our
imaginations we can understand the words, the music, the conversation and the
sights of everyday life as types of daily bread that nourishes our bodies and
souls. In that sense the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, could speak of God’s
Word as bread which can be consumed (Jeremiah
15:16). But, we need to eat in order to understand just as understanding
precedes eating. Jesus had to bring the thousands forward from eating bread
loaves and fish to eating the living word of God. We have to start somewhere
and human hunger is an obvious starting place.
With
‘scandalous’ talk of flesh and blood..
But, Jesus did not just say I am giving you the living bread
which is my flesh but he also says that he is giving you his blood. Not only is
flesh scandalous to pious 1st century years but blood is more than
scandalous because it signifies the very life of one. To share in the eucharist is to share in the
life of God’s own family while drawing into that family the great unwashed, the
confused, the unwelcome and the marginalised.
This is what it means – concretely – to live eucharistically
– in full communion with God as a loving
parent and with all of his children who are our brothers and sisters in the
family of faith that invites everyone in.
We, too, can be transformed into bread broken for a world
that hungers. Here is a short prayer based on a reading of John that I composed
some years ago:
In the beginning was the Word
And the World became flesh
And that flesh became bread;
Which has now become us
Broken for a united world
Returning to the source from which it came
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